After reading everyone's story, I feel very lucky that so far I have no real physical obstacles to pregnancy, that I know of. Knock on wood! I feel for all you ladies who have been doing this for a long time. I can only imagine that it would be really disappointing to keep getting your hopes up every month. I hope you all get your positives really soon!

@Poppy528 I understand how you feel! I wonder all the time if I am doing the right thing by having children. My family has a severe history of mental illness and I am prone to depression and have been since childhood. I wonder if it's fair to bring a child into that environment, with such a high risk of passing whatever genetic predisposition to the "crazies" I may have. I just keep telling myself that if it was not mental illness, it could be something else I passed along. No one is perfect and everyone inherits both good and bad from their parents. I have had everything under control for a while and luckily I have been able to forgo meds. I find that I can control my emotions with excercise and diet. If I don't excercise, though, I get extremely depressed and anxious very quickly. It's like a switch that gets turned on and until I force myself to excercise I feel that life is impossible and nothing will ever be good or happy again. I am especially freaked by the possibilty of post partum depression. It just scares me to think about it! I guess I'm just putting the cart before the horse. I have to get pregnant first!

Since I am just at the very beginning of TTC I have not learned very much about the different methods and types of aids that enhance fertility. The only thing that I have been using is some Wondfo ovulation test strips that a friend gave me. She swears that she got pregnant after using these the first month. I think it was probably luck, but it can't hurt to try, right? I have also been taking folic acid.

I think it is perfectly normal-- and very mature-- to spend some time introspecting about reproduction if you have a condition that is at least partially genetic. But here's the way I look at it-- you, currently, are living with that condition (whatever it may be). Do you feel that life is not worth living? If the alternative were non-existence, which do you think your baby would choose?

Incidentally there are certainly conditions / diseases that, for me at least, could tip the balance towards non-existence. I firmly believe there ARE fates worse than death.

@poppy and violetindigo, I understand your concerns about the possibility of passing on physical or mental illnesses to your children. But look at it this way. If your parents had known that you would each have the physical or mental struggles that you have, do you think that they should have just decided not to give you life? Do your struggles make life not worth living? I don't mean to belittle your struggles in any way! I too have struggled with depression, anxiety, and a host of other problems. I too worry about passing on these troubles to my kids. But there is so much more to life than these problems. To bring a child into the world is to give him or her the full experience of LIFE, with all of its love, laughter, holidays, vacations, birthday parties, family, friends.... You might pass on your sicknesses, and your child, as a teenager, might hate you for it for a while. But it balances out--no, it MORE than balances out--by all of the amazing things you can offer to a child. Don't consider yourselves poor candidates for reproducing just because you have problems. Darwinian ideology led to the Holocaust, because people believed that only the "best" deserved to live. But we have all learned from that colossal mistake. It is not possible for you to bring a life into this world that is not worth living. If you decide not to have children for any reason, that is completely your prerogative; if it would put your health at risk, or if you believe that your health would disable you from safely raising a child, that is completely understandable. But I don't believe that you should let these fears that you've expressed about passing on poor genetics stop you from having a baby.

EDIT: Blade posted while I was writing mine; I didn't mean to copy her!